Thursday, November 29, 2012

Sub-Genres Without Number

I continue to run my little two player SWN game on Tuesdays. I find that I can accommodate my "Gamer ADD" in SWN by sprinkling the vastness of space with different planets that reflect the different flavors of science fiction. The campaign has already gone through a leg of "dungeon crawling in space" and a leg of "Traveller style commerce" and is now in "Cyberpunk 2020" mode. I mean, I could set up a campaign like this with really almost any sci-fi game, but I find the simplicity of SWN to be endlessly attractive as a GM with limited time to prepare the game.

I find that I have ideas for some Big Ass Space War (a la Star Wars), weird pseudo-fantasy (a la Empire of the Petal Throne), and plenty of other ideas that I want to be vague about. (My players read this blog)

I'm pretty excited about this setup, because we can keep the game fresh and switch it up when we start to get tired of Shadowruns or Keep on the Borderlands in Spaaaaaaaaaaace or whatever.

I rolled out the Combat Cyborgs I posted recently. The party chewed through the first group, but ran into some problems with the second group...it could've been a TPK if not for a few lucky/unlucky die rolls on both sides.

This Tuesday: the group is considering taking a job that involves "sterilizing a compromised biotech facility." That sounds totally legit, right?

There are always other jobs if they decide not to. The joys of sandboxing, right?

2 comments:

From a player, we kinda surprised the first three, yeah, kinda. And our faithful gm always throws in an ethical twist. It was supposed to be a personnel extraction, 1 person only he wouldn't leave without his daughter, who was wired in to the main frame like Spock's brain and another dude who was being tested for pain tolerances so we carefully unhooked her and took 3 instead of 1 if only we got paid triple.

I did give you bonus experience, since you took on extra risk without any financial gain. It would've been much simpler to knock out Dr. Tang and to just leave the other guy stuck in the torture chair.

Of course, then Gustav wouldn't have taken that kinetic wrist spike through the chest, and that was greatly amusing to me. ;)